Double Fault (29 page)

  "You still do, and it's very valuable—"

  "Bullshit, I can't tell you a thing. Even more astonishing historical trivia?" Willy mentioned lightly. "
You
were once jealous of
me
."

  "When was that?"

  "Get out of here. When you lost the Jox in the first round or something, and then came up to watch me win the New Freedom? You were pretty pissed off at that party."

  "I was not," Eric maintained. "I kept in the background to give you the limelight, which you richly deserved."

  "You thought I was a fat-headed jerk!"

  "I did not!"

  "You refuse to admit you were jealous?"

  "Willy, that was two years ago; why are you getting worked up? What does it matter?"

  "It matters," she growled. "Good God, why not apply for sainthood already."

  "I'm sorry, but I was very happy for you and I wasn't jealous."

  Willy stewed the rest of the day. Eric tended to rewrite the past so that his shit didn't stink. In fact, the memory of his stiffness at that party, not to mention his ducking to the john during match point, had grown strangely precious.

  After two weeks, instead of switching off the light and collecting her in his arms, Eric lay back with his hands behind his head. "I'm feeling like a fifth wheel, Wilhelm. Tomorrow I'm taking the train to New York."

  "What's at home that you don't have here?" she asked on an elbow. "Courts, weights, videos, games—"

  "Yeah, all those games we play."

  "—You don't even have to cook your own food."

  "I want to buy some Hanukkah presents for my family. I want to see my father, and thank him for his help. Even tennis—after so much and more coming, I need a break."

  It was decent of him not to mention that by-the-by his wife was also cold, aloof, and hostile. He turned out the light and rolled over. Tentatively, Willy slipped a hand over his hip.

  "Why don't we just go to sleep tonight, huh?" he mumbled. "You're always so wiped out. Get some rest."

  He patted her hand, and indeed on release from what she never used to regard as a marital duty Willy's mind had gone black and her body limp before she'd time to withdraw the hand from his pubic hair.

  Eric was packed before breakfast, and after slurping a cup of coffee stood on the mess porch by his bags. Willy was aware of keeping an extra foot from him, as if avoiding a magnetic field.

  "I don't suppose," he said flatly, "you'd even consider coming with me."

  Willy loitered by the rail, wishing he'd phrased the statement as a question; maybe that would have made it easier to say yes. But she had taken a certain tack, and now appeared stuck with it. "No," she said gloomily. "I guess I've got to stay…. I could drive you to the station."

  "There's a bus taking students to Old Saybrook in ten minutes. I wouldn't want you to miss out on an hour's
practice
. You'd never forgive yourself. Much less me."

  Hugging Eric good-bye, she clawed her fingers into his coat, like one more desolate Sweetspot boarder deserted on these steps and left to the mercy of strangers. Only after the bus had plowed down the drive too far to flag it down did she remember it was December 14, and she hadn't wished him happy anniversary.

  Willy's eagerness to outdo herself dropped a notch the day Eric left. Though she'd prevailed upon him to leave a rope behind—he'd no idea that the exercise was verboten—the inherent absurdity of repeatedly hopping over a swinging leather thong brought her more than once to a stupefied standstill. Mortified that she could indeed be losing her drive, she levied an extra, punitive three thousand.

  At dinner, with students cleared off for the holidays, the mess was bereft. Ordinarily fighting to be heard above the roar and clink, Willy missed their vibrant clamor. Sitting next to Eric, she'd been a fountain of banter; now she couldn't think of word-one to say to her coach.

  "You and Undershorts," Max hazarded, "don't seem chummy."

  "Relations are a little strained."

  "Maybe it's for the best he left, then. Discord is distracting."

  "The trouble was," she said sharply, "it wasn't distracting enough."

  That night Willy dreamed that she was late for a tournament. She told Eric at her side,
I'm never going to make it if I don't run
. Eric advised,
You'll never make it, so relax
. Willy began to hoof it anyway; the stadium was miles away. But the more she poured on steam, the more nominal her advancement became. She was virtually running in place. Willy grazed her fingers across her monumental thighs, which were hard, striated, and stationary. The muscles were so heavily developed that they'd turned to stone. At last she gave up. Easing to a walk, she could proceed more rapidly than at a sprint. Eric reached for her hand, and the dreary overcast sky burst with sunlight. She would still not make it to the tournament, but suddenly a mere tennis match wasn't of the slightest importance. Willy laughed, kissed Eric's hand, and proposed that they order the broiled chicken.

  At Christmas, Willy's regime was given a kick in the pants from a call to her family. Gert had passed her final round of tests to become a fully fledged CPA; according to Gert, Daddy was "thrilled." One by one they each got on the line and expressed lavish concern about Willy's knee. Their accord in urging her to reconsider her choice of profession now that her father's prediction of calamity had come to pass betrayed a powwow over pumpkin pie behind her back. Well, screw them. For a few refreshingly irate minutes after the call, Willy felt seventeen.

  There was now a goal to shoot for. On the basis of her ranking previous to injury, Max had secured Willy a wild card for an indoor event in Providence at the end of January. Yet when Max conceded that Willy was nearly tournament-ready after New Year's, his eyes narrowed, and he didn't commend her improvement with any enthusiasm.

  By mid-January, Willy had got lax about checking on Max's whereabouts when she jumped rope. He was a burly man, and when the thong beat tellingly out of synch with the radio, the desk blocking the rec room door proved a feckless impediment. This time he didn't ask for the rope, but tore its handles from her hands, jerked open a window, and tossed the Everlast onto the snow-covered porch roof. In the draft, Willy clasped her arms and shivered. She chilled easily of late, though she'd always been hardy in the cold.

  "Come with me." Hooking her collar like the scruff of a cat, Max hauled her downstairs, across the icy flagstones, and into the unattended health clinic in the next outbuilding. "Stand on that scale."

  Willy did as she was told, and jumped. Maybe the needle was stuck.

  "
Ninety-eight!
What is this shit? You should be one-ten! Tell me," Max snatched her T-shirt again, "are you throwing up? I told you at the outset, no eating disorders, Will. They
bore
me."

  Willy wrenched away and stepped off the treacherous scale. It was obviously calibrated wrong. "I haven't puked since I was twelve," she said stiffly, tugging at her stretched-out collar.

  "So you're just hopping it all away, are you?" Max taunted. "Why should I pay for a dishrag to go to Providence?"

  "My game is in great shape, you said so yourself."

  "But you're not. Your skin is the color of oatmeal. I hate oatmeal. Your hair has no luster. Your eyes are dull as frozen dogshit. We're going to pass on that wild card, kid, I'm not letting you go. Providence would be a disaster."

  "Max, no! I've got to go!" Willy wailed, knowing full well that Max never made empty threats, never changed his mind, and was never moved a millimeter by petulance, promises, or imprecation. "After I've worked so hard! After all those exercises!"

  "
I've
worked hard, too. It's cost me plenty time and money just to get that knee of yours to bend more than six degrees and bear more than five ounces. I don't go to that much trouble as a roundabout way of returning one of my players to the hospital. What the fuck are you trying to do, kill yourself?"

  Glowering, Willy picked up a towel and smeared her face. "Some days that's an appealing idea."

  Max grabbed her wrist, forcing her to look him in the eye. "Don't you
ever
say that. Not even as a joke."

  She twisted her wrist from his grip. "Don't fret. I'm not the type."

  "You are."

  Willy snorted.

  "Oh, fine, maybe not with razor blades," he jeered. "You may not like to hear this, but when I ran across you in Nevada your skills were way behind your potential. I snapped you up anyway because what you
did
have was power—a tenacity, a fire, a singlemindedness that's a lot harder to find than pretty forehands. But, Will, kiddo? Boomerang that power back in your own direction, it's gonna
take
your head off
."

F
OR THE NEXT SIX
weeks, even with his students returned, Max didn't let Willy out of his sight. No more rope, no more treadmill, no more line sprints. Two hours of practice, end of story, after which he force-fed his diminished protégée until she felt sick. Meanwhile, Max remained adamant about Providence, which came and went. Ever after the name of that Rhode Island town, which means "divine guidance," would resonate with the suggestion that the gods were no longer leading Willy in the right direction.

  Recuperation from overtraining brought new banes. For two months Willy hadn't menstruated at all. Max rescheduled her debut match to coincide with the return of Willy's period.

  There are periods and periods. Her mother subscribed to the grinand-bear-it school, and Willy had never been one to lay in bed to bleed. Sure, she'd played through them before, doping up with ibuprofen. But this one was a record-breaker for Willy's fourteen mutinous years of reproductive life. Standing straight to serve was an effort, and by the third game in the first set Willy had to request medical dispensation to dash to the locker room. It was embarrassing to explain her distress to the male umpire, but the tampon was soaked and oozing into her white overpants, and would soon bloom onto the dress. She took advantage of the break to vent her bowels, liquefied in the hormonal onslaught.

  Five Advils hadn't made a dent in the cramps; her intestines were empty and gaseous. This was
only
her period, Willy recited, believing what she'd been taught: that because menstruation happens to all women (or perhaps because it happens to women) it was a trivial complaint. Still, the notion beckoned that if the same frivolous incapacity assaulted her unsuspecting husband, he would promptly check himself into a hospital.

  The match was still close and went three sets, but an attack of vertigo in the tiebreak swirled Willy out of the first round like the flush of a toilet.

  In her second attempt, Willy was playing fantastically well. All the spectators who approached her afterward agreed, sharing her outrage. Since Willy had entered a zone, she was playing the lines. But the difference between great tennis and punk tennis could come down to a single inch. Umpires distinguished between the two, since the days were long gone that an opponent could be relied upon to call shots fairly in the interests of good sportsmanship.

  But maybe someone had slipped this umpire a C-note; maybe he didn't like her uppity attitude; maybe he was petty-power mad and abusing his clout out of sheer badness. All that was certain was that every time her shot was anywhere near the line the ump called, "
Fault!
" When her adversary's backhands bounced three inches deep, the squat, pudgy arbiter picked his nose.

  Willy tried everything. Arguing, refusing to resume play—she'd learned all the gambits from ballgirling for McEnroe. Defiance dug the man in; badgered, he doubled his chin, which dimpled like a crumpet. Yet suffering injustice in stoic silence didn't soften his calls, either. The little toad, he couldn't hit a tennis ball himself if it were attached to his racket with a bungee cord.

  When not even the small crowd's hisses shamed the ump, Willy had to aim so glaringly inside the court that she mollycoddled would-be winners into common returns. Although she
knew
the danger in this situation was not losing points but her temper, some information remains belligerently theoretical. Willy mumbled, "Don't let that worm get to you," to no avail. In the third set, when she was sick of babying the ball after having been in prime form at the outset, the umpire called even one of her safey-safey shots long and that was the limit. Willy blew a gasket and began to hit out.

  Hit out in every sense. The umpire smiled, like an infant passing gas. When later that year Jeff Tarango walked out of Wimbledon over prejudicial line calls, Eric would be disgusted and Willy would acquire a new anti-hero.

  Nevertheless, only as her third tournament approached did Willy begin to feel well and truly cursed. She and Max had allowed two nights before the match in Ocala for Willy to get acclimated to the baking Florida sun. Through the first evening's dinner, her lips tingled. "So you'll have a cold sore," she growled in the bathroom mirror that night. It always seems bigger to you than to the rest of the world, and it will go away.

  Except this particular outbreak was bound to seem pretty goddamned big to the rest of the world. Tossing that night, Willy kept licking her lips and rubbing them together; they were hot, and itched ferociously. The area of irritation was so vast that she wondered if she'd eaten something to which she was allergic.

  Rinsing her face the next morning, Willy lifted her head to glance in the mirror and gasped. Her whole mouth had exploded. Two patches of tiny raging blisters had invaded her chin.

  "Good God."

  "Oh,
Max
," Willy wailed. "Shut the door!"

  Willy insisted they order breakfast from room service. Max took the tray from a bellboy while she hid in the john.